How do you link disparate islands of VoIP with traditional TDM? ENUM of course!
The problem has been establishing a way to do ENUM globally. But NeuStar and the GSM Association this week completed a pilot of PathFinder, meant to be a global carrier ENUM service. PathFinder translates telephony numbers into IP addresses, so calls, MMS and other services can be seamlessly routed over all manner of carrier networks: fixed, mobile, packet, TDM.
ENUM unifies traditional telephony and next-generation IP networks, and provides a critical framework for mapping and processing diverse network addresses. It transforms the telephone number — the most basic and commonly used communications address — into a universal identifier that can be used across many different devices and applications (voice, fax, mobile, e-mail, text messaging, location-based services and the Internet).
